


Operation: Sun-Drown

by Pondfrost (AkitsuneLune)



Category: Warriors - Erin Hunter
Genre: AU February, Aliases, Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Heist, Alternate Universe - Human, Bipolar Tawnypelt, Club owners, Cop Tigerstar, E-Sports, Exes, F/F, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, It's very minor the M rating is just for safety, M/M, Mob boss Firestar, More Characters To Show Up, Multi, One Night Stands, Organized Crime, Polyamory is Normal, WAUrriors FebrAUry, be gay do crimes, futuristic setting, just an excuse for a playlist and some quippy one-liners, liable to be abandoned, you could show your grandma this fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:01:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29140476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AkitsuneLune/pseuds/Pondfrost
Summary: Simone ‘No Cracks’ Glass has never hit the ground. Grifters known to the underworld as Brutus and Antony, aka brother-sister duo Baz and Tony Césaire have never needed anyone else in their family crime unit until they get attacked by one of the most powerful organizations in the New World. Shaheer is promising himself he's just doing one last favour for his little-sister-cum-mob-boss, Fatimah. And Casper just really, really needs something to do on weekends.
Relationships: Brambleclaw & Tawnypelt (Warriors), Brambleclaw/Squirrelflight (Warriors), Brambleclaw/Stormfur (Warriors), Feathertail/Ferncloud (Warriors), Feathertail/Tawnypelt (Warriors), Rowanclaw/Tawnypelt (Warriors)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 8
Collections: WAUrriors FebrAUry





	1. The Roman Twins

**Author's Note:**

> this is insanely dumb but I'm into it. expect nothing to make sense. less plot more atmosphere. get into it babey

Baz Césaire had an impressive vocabulary of profanity. The opportunity to exercise it all arose on Saturday morning when he booted up the command centre of the Coliseum Club. His bouncers had cleared out all of last night’s revellers and even the day drinkers wouldn’t be in for another few hours, which was a real shame; no one was privy to Baz’s sesquipedalianism.

_ Welcome, Brutus, _ appeared on the flickering blue screen, as it did every morning. Baz first opened the automatic tally sheet to check the new balance from last night, as he did every morning.

_ $0.00 _

It was then that his swearing began. It continued as he clicked the mysterious, nondescript link beneath it. Probably a virus, but Baz could be forgiven for forgetting caution. It wasn’t a virus, luckily for the air’s innocence; it was a text file, as ancient as the process it took for it to download onto the command centre.

His stream of curses kept flowing as he opened it, scanned the ransom note, and slumped back in his chair. It abated as he let out a long yell.

That was when Tony appeared from the club to stand in the doorway of the command centre, probably nursing a hangover from the way she stared daggers at her yelling brother. “What?”

“The Sett,” was all Baz had to say before Tony began to advertise her own knowledge of the field of cussing.

“How much?”

“Everything.”

“And they want…”

“The map.”

Tony began to swear again. Baz opted for leaning further back in his chair, covering his eyes with his hands, and hoping he might wake up to the screeching of his alarm and a pounding hangover of his own.

“The down payment on our second location’s due next week,” he said to himself. “And the wages in four days.”

“I know, goddamnit, I know,” Tony snapped, banging a fist against a filing cabinet. “We need a plan.”

“We can’t give it to them.”

“I know,” she said again.

The map in question was certainly worth more than the Coliseum’s earnings, but the Sett knew that too. This was a matter greater than money; this was Tony and Baz’s pride and livelihood. Coliseum, they had built themselves, while the map… Really, the only useful thing their father had ever given them other than a baker’s dozen of disorders and complexes.

“Where is it now?”

“In deep-encryption,” Baz said, furrowing his brow and tapped into the password to access the first layer of the Coliseum and the Césaire twins’ virtual vault.  _ Then again, so was Coliseum’s money, and they got in there. _

Tony paced the room, which was hardly more than a few square feet of computers and hard docs, intermittently releasing a sharp curse under her breath.

Baz swept a hand over his shaved hand, pressed that hand into a fist, and slowly counted to ten. He could add layers of protection, though none strong enough to withstand a few dedicated hackers in this timeframe. No, the only solution was to take down the Sett before they found a way into the place he’d hidden the map. It might be days, or it might be weeks, but without their leverage of money and rank, the Sett was primed to ransack the near-dead bodies of Baz and Tony’s fortunes.

A sick feeling wormed in Baz’s stomach. The Sett had certainly waited long enough. Waited while Baz and Tony had paid them like idiots, thinking they could buy their silence about the map, buy their protection for their budding chain of clubs. Now that the twins were reaching to open a second location, thinking at last the secret had died with their father, the Sett had struck, and they were taking no prisoners.

_ We paid them for years in exchange for armistice and… all this time, they were biding their time, waiting to crack us open and scavenge what they find inside. _

“There’s only one way,” Tony finally said, stopping mid-stride and turning on her heel, still a black strapped shoe from last night. She turned that dark stare on Baz, the one they both had ready for this kind of situation. “We’re going to need a proper team.”

“We have a team,” Baz growled. “You and me.”

Tony waved a hand. “We can’t do everything, Baz. I know what you’re feeling, and I’m of the same mind. But this is the only way.”

Baz gnawed on his lip fiercely, staring up at his sister and evaluating their options. In his mind, there was nothing he and Tony couldn’t accomplish. They’d been together since the literal womb, had grown up fighting and pissing each other off every day. Banding together after their father’s death, taking care of their mother, and finding a flair for this life they’d chosen that suited them. Tony was whip-smart, fast-talking, and had more false identities than shoes, while Baz had a brute-force approach to combat and a needle’s, sharp and delicate, for the tech side of things. The Roman Twins. Brutus and Antony to business partners. Baz and Tony Césaire. Together from the start and together to the end, and god-fucking-damn-it they didn’t need a team to set fire to the Sett.

But.

While Baz fully believed it was within the realm of possibility that the Roman Twins alone could take down the Sett, he also knew it was a long-shot at best. While they had diverse portfolios despite their specialties, Baz knew they could achieve so much more if they had a full, capable team behind them.

Normally, he’d be more than up for risking the long-shot if it meant keeping it in the family, but this was different. The map, Coliseum, and everything he and Tony had managed to eke out for themselves were on the line, now.

Not to mention that if the secret of the map got out, it would be open season on both of them, both for the information the map contained and for the legions of people their shitstain of a father had screwed over before he’d kicked the bucket, looking to collect on a blood debt. In order to protect himself and Tony, swallowing his pride was the only option.

“Fuck.” Baz slapped his hand down on the desk next to the keyboard. “Alright. Let’s round up a crew.”

Tony gave a satisfied nod, reaching for her phone.

“I know where to start,” Baz grunted, stopping her mid-motion. “Time to call in a favour.”


	2. Calling in a Favour

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more bullshittttttttttt

When Shaheer Awaz stopped in front of the club, deep in the slums that he did his absolute best to never even skirt, a rat scurried past, right over his shoes. He recoiled, making a disgusted noise, then looked up at the flickering neon sign.  _ Coliseum, _ it named the club. While it was in less of a state of… collapse, than the other two-storied houses that lined the streets, cramped so close together that they appeared to be drunkards leaning on each other for support, there was nothing entirely remarkable about the outside of the Coliseum Club.  _ When in Rome… _ the sign above the double doors suggested.

_ Sounds about right, _ Shaheer thought, and tapped the pad to let the electronic doors whir open. The gambling den was smokey and dark despite it being ten a.m, and far more polished than the exterior of the building suggested. Shaheer stepped over a suspicious dark stain in the velvet carpeting, making his way past deserted blackjack tables and roulette wheels to the back room where a number that was so deep in his phone archives, nearly ten years later, that he wasn’t sure his phone had retained it, has instructed him to go. But there it was, clear as day— _ Baz: I’m calling in my favour.  _ And then his club’s address, and orders to go to the back room.

Slightly ominous, but what better things did he have to do on a Saturday morning? Fatimah had warned him to be unpredictable this week, anyway. Straight-edge Shaheer frequenting the slums and this sort of establishment was plenty unpredictable.

There were fewer burly men in sunglasses than he expected as Shaheer passed the bar toward the only lit room in the building. If it came to that, though, they were probably just get in Baz’s way, Shaheer knew.

“Well, well, well,” a voice that he hadn’t heard in a long, long time rasped from the side of the doorway as he finally stepped into the back room. The room was already rather small, and the claustrophobic feel wasn’t helped by the rows of computers that seemed to have been jammed in with the intention of fitting as many as possible. Strips of fluorescence didn’t do much to combat the blue glow of screens.

“Antonia,” he mumbled, giving her a bit of a nod.

Baz’s sister raked her eyes over him and seemed to find the result lacking. Shaheer thought that was rather unfair. She should judge him based on what he was; a well-to-do Sicilian-Sudanese immigrant who co-owned a successful corporation-team-building company and whose worst vices ranked as exotic teas and long saunas. He looked the part.

Not based on the legacy he had tried very, very hard to erase; his consigliere father, Grigiu, and the blood-soaked past he shared with the Sicilian mob.

He gave her the same once-over, if only to even the scores. It seemed she had been in attendance of whatever depravities Coliseum hosted on Friday nights, judging by her black cocktail dress and make-up. She was also in Antony-mode; foundation a deep enough brown to match her skin had been carefully buffed into skin, entirely hiding the vitiligo that made Tony instantly recognizable. Since he’d last seen Baz’s sister, she seemed to have learned to inhabit her body with more confidence; while Baz’s broad build was an asset in brawls, Tony’s same doughy arms and general roundness had been a sticking point for her, a decade ago. That shrinking discomfort was long gone, replaced with thick silver bangles up her forearms and an artfully cocked eyebrow. He held Antony’s challenging stare for a moment longer, feeling discomfort crawling on his back. He didn’t belong here, not anymore.

“Shaheer.”

There he was. Baz— _ Brutus _ —stood from behind a long line of computers. Baz’s easy smile and long black dreads had both been shaved away since they’d seen each other last, replaced with the stony set of Brutus’s jaw and stubbly shaved head. Shaheer shifted. This wasn’t the man he’d gone to college with, not the man he’d… well, that didn’t matter now. He had been brick-stupid enough to come here, and now he was going to have to listen to Brutus if he wanted to walk out again.

Baz didn’t seem to notice the shift between them. Instead, he crossed the room and folded Shaheer in a crushing hug. Shaheer wheezed, delicately patting Baz’s back. The elapsed years had done nothing to soften the hard lines of Baz’s body. He was still as absurdly concrete-muscled as ever. After a moment, Shaheer quite determinedly pulled away.

“What do you need, Br—Baz?”

“It’s good to see you, Shaheer,” Baz said, eyes too soft. Shaheer steeled himself.

“What do you need, Baz?”

Baz sighed and stuffed his hands into his pockets. He still dressed as plainly as an extra in a low-budget movie, at least; not the slick suit Shaheer would have expected from this sort of place and the man that owned it.

“Sit down, why don’t you?” Baz offered, and Shaheer wondered if it was a real offer or a veiled order. “We should… probably get reacquainted.”

If Shaheer had to guess for what purpose Baz would text him eight years after they’d last seen each other, it would have either been for something very illegal or the kind of reacquaintance that Baz probably wasn’t implying. Not with Tony there, certainly.

Shaheer allowed himself to be herded out of the command centre and into the back of the club. The tables were sanitized, he noticed with no small amount of relief. Baz pressed him down into one of the booths then slid in after him, effectively cutting off his means of escape. Was  _ that  _ a threat? Tony paused at a bar then came over a moment later, placing a glass down, and poured herself a drink. She hadn’t brought another glass with her.

Just as the silence began to stretch, Shaheer glancing quickly between Tony who seemed to take pleasure in slurping her drink loudly, and Baz, who was studying Shaheer with the sort of intensity that made his ears burn, Baz finally spoke.

“We’re in deep shit, Shaheer. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t dire.” Baz’s jaw tightened at his own admission and Shaheer knew it was no small feat that Baz Césaire had swallowed his pride.

“I know,” Shaheer answered. “So what do you need?”

“It’s more of a who,” Tony said, and Baz winced.

“Well…” But Baz couldn’t really finish that sentence when he had no explanation.

Shaheer grimaced. “Ah.”

Baz spread his heads, looking as apologetic as Shaheer had ever seen him.  _ When did he gain the ability to feel remorse? _

“I understand. What’s the occasion, if I can ask?” Shaheer didn’t really want to know the specifics, but whatever had caused Baz to both ask for help and feel sorry for using him had to be something monumental.

Baz opened his mouth, then shut it again when he saw Tony’s expression. Shaheer turned his head sharply to find Tony giving him a cool look.

“You can trust me,” Shaheer found himself promising, whether that was entirely true or not.

Tony snorted. Baz gave him another long, searching look, and finally said, “It’s the Sett.”

Even with all the distance Shaheer had worked to put between him and the underworld, Shaheer sucked in an instinctive breath at the name of the most notorious, widespread crime syndicate anywhere in the New World. “And they’re after the map?”

It hardly required confirmation, but Baz nodded, looking grim. Tony’s deadly stare snapped to her brother. “You told him?”

“A long time ago,” Baz defended himself. “This is the first time we’ve seen each other in years.”

Tony subsided with another dark look at Shaheer. The memory of just how ruthless sisters could be made Shaheer grimace again.

“Well, no promises on when she’ll get here. But I’ll call Pinion,” he eventually said. Baz nodded, his gaze brimming with gratitude and more that Shaheer really didn’t care to put a name to in the moment.

Tony stretched out her arms, cracking her knuckles, then knocked back the rest of her drink and commented, “While we wait, I’ve got someone else to add to the crew.”

“No,” Baz growled.

“Yes,” Tony said, and slipped out her phone. Baz subsided with a pained look. In that moment, Shaheer was fairly sure he could guess who was in control between the Roman Twins, and by extension, the new team.

At least, who  _ would _ be in control until Fatimah got there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you're absolutely welcome


	3. No Cracks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND SO IT CONTINUES

Simone Glass slipped her phone back into the pocket of her sweatpants and grinned.

“You’re heading out?” Lenora asked, spotting the familiar expression from across the kitchen island.

Simone nodded, already flexing her fingers in anticipation, then drained the last of her smoothie and hopped up to give her sister a hug goodbye. “Thanks, Nora. See you around.”

“Don’t get into trouble,” Nora said by way of farewell, pulling back and holding onto Simone’s shoulders with a serious look. “I mean it. And please don’t use the drainpipe, I just got it fixed.”

“No promises.”

Nora sighed and waved as Simone popped open the screen door at the back of their apartment and swung herself out onto the black rungs of the backstairs. And started to climb. It was slower than taking the stairs, but Simone wanted to warm up, anyway.

When you got a call  _ that _ mysterious from Antony, you had to be ready for anything.

Within a moment or two, Simone hauled herself up to the flat gray top of the apartment building. The sun had made it over the buildings, which was a glare risk. She slipped on the goggles, donned her grippy gloves, and started her flight.

With a running jump off the side of the building, she mentally charted the quickest course to Coliseum. Her hands locked around pipes and the rough edges of the building while her mind raced atop in a mental bird’s eye view of the New World, tracing an orange line through its blue streets, winding away from the middle class neighbourhood where she and Lenora shared an apartment and towards the outer slums.

Simone landed lightly on the slanted roof of the Roman Twins’ club, noting the weakness of the shingles on the eaves as they creaked beneath her spiked boots. At the midpoint of March, the ice that had melted across their roof was likely weighing heavy on the drains. _Someone’s been cutting corners._ Then she scurried over the roof’s zenith and down to the back of the club. A small parking lot, with a flowerbed for her to land comfortably on. She noted the black-painted Mamba parked with a twinge of approval. _I’ve always wanted one of those._ Cars usually weren’t where she funnelled her ill-gotten gains, nor where her expensive tastes focused, but Simone could appreciate the sleek lines and purr of the engine.

Then finally, she slipped into the back of the club. The layout was near what she had guessed based on the shape of the building and from being inside others of its kind. Antony had never invited her properly onto the Roman Twins’ property, likely to maintain some sense of secrecy and power. Or to maintain Brutus’s head’s position on his shoulders. Simone wondered what occasion had called for an end to that buffer.

She slipped through the backroom, unconsciously scanning it to guess at the dimensions and try to estimate the possibility of a secret room or vault with a hidden door. It was rather plain; sparsely furnished with one large table in the middle, lined with chairs. A room for business dealings.

Simone could hear faint murmurs coming from deeper in the building and slipped to the edge of the doorway. A blue glow— _ Command center _ —emanated from one door. At the end of the hallway was the glint of glasses hung above a bar, and further, the faint sunlight of the street outside. The murmurs stopped. Simone slipped out of sight and waited.

Then jumped out and swept the feet out from under Brutus as he walked through the doorway. Tried, at least; he probably had a foot and a hundred pounds on her, not to mention a lifetime of dealing with sudden assailants. Still, Brutus stumbled, head whipping around to find Simone perched next to the doorway, and swung for her.

He was fast, faster than she remembered, and as she darted back, he clipped her jaw. She reeled, then retaliated by slamming her heel, with its small spiky treads for optimal grip, into his knee. Brutus shouted, then reached for her neck. Simone hopped out of the way again, but not fast enough. A moment later, he had her in a headlock.

“Fucker,” she wheezed, trying to wrench herself free.

“She’s not going to be much use if you break her legs, Brutus,” Antony chided her brother, having appeared to see what the fuss was about. Simone could really only see the woman’s bare brown calves and black heels.

“She attacked me!” Brutus snapped, his forearm still firmly hooked under Simone’s chin. “You shouldn’t have— _ Shit! _ ”

Simone bit him again, harder, but Brutus didn’t let go. She wondered if he was also used to his assailants biting him.

“Brutus,” Antony said as firmly as if she were speaking to two children fighting on a playground.

With a growl that matched his sister’s, Brutus tore himself away from Simone and her snapping jaws. Simone whirled, ready to start the brawl over again, but Antony held up a hand for peace.

The glamorous woman looked rather out of place in the grimy backroom. Brutus didn’t, with his khakis and stained t-shirt. No sense of style, as it had been for the last ever-since-Simone-had-met-him. Antony stepped between them and laid a hand on Simone’s shoulder.

“Come on, we’re speaking in the club.”

Simone shot the still-swearing Brutus a grin as his sister escorted her down the hallway and into the deserted club. Despite Simone’s wistful look at the bar, Antony kept them moving and finally gestured for Simone to slide into one of the booths.

Another man was sat there; by all accounts, unremarkable. He could probably fit into a crowd easily, which made him noteworthy in Simone’s mind. You had to pay careful mind to remember the faces of the plain. He was biracial, she guessed, African and possibly Italian from the cut and make of his shirt, and the faint smell of aftershave. Approximately five years older than her which would put him at thirty. He fidgeted with his hands and gave her a worried smile in greeting.  _ Either nervous or pretending to be, and advertising all sorts of information about himself by accident. Or very, very carefully advertising a lot of fake information. _

“Let’s get acquainted,” Antony said, sitting next to Simone and spreading her hands on the table in a peaceful gesture. Brutus sat as well, glowering at Simone and Antony. “This is Shaheer Awaz. Shaheer, this is No Cracks.”

Simone shook his hand, testing the grip and the eye contact. Definitely a reserved man, and more a follower than a leader. Shaheer offered her another, slightly-more confident smile. She dismissed the possibility of him as a threat.  _ Surely that’s not his real name, but still. Whatever his specialty is, he can’t have been at it long. _

After a long, evaluating look at both of them, Antony said, “Shaheer’s already been caught up on our situation. No Cracks, the long and short of it is, we’ll pay you handsomely if—”

“I’m in.”

Antony grinned. “That’s what I thought.”

“No Cracks,” Shaheer repeated, squinting at Simone. “There’s a story there, I’m sure?”

“Maybe if you’re nice, I’ll tell you sometime,” Simone said.

Shaheer’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, looking nervously from Brutus to Simone, then sat up straight quite suddenly like a hunting dog catching the smell of game. He slipped his phone out, where a notification hovered, then vanished, and looked at Antony. “Alright, she’s coming.”

“Who’s coming?” Simone asked, reclining in the booth to feign indifference.

Antony cracked a humourless smile. “Pinion.”

Simone’s gaze snapped back down to that phone in an instant, then up to Shaheer’s face. “You have a contact that knows Pinny?!”

“He  _ is  _ the contact,” Brutus grunted.

Shaheer smiled faintly. “She’s my sister.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you casusbe11i for continuing to keep me fed in these long nights


	4. Pinion

Fatimah Awaz had three vices; beautiful women, Bluefire whiskey, and high-stakes ten-high card games.

Those were all lies, of course. You couldn’t hang on to power for more than a month if anyone knew your weaknesses, but there were a lot of people in the New World who made it their business to learn pressure points. The easiest way to put them off the scent was to make them think they’d ferreted out her secrets already.

No, Fatimah indulged—and considered herself good at guessing when a woman was a ploy, when a drink was laced, and when a deck was stacked—but she really only had one or two true pressure points, and she made it her top priority to keep him quite hidden from prying eyes.

That was why she entered Coliseum in a bad mood, already knowing what she’d find; her older brother, getting tangled up in the underworld for the first time in about a decade, after she’d  _ expressly  _ told him to be careful this week. Fatimah didn’t like bad moods; not in herself and not in her employees. They made people sloppy and argumentative, and she knew better than to consider herself exempt. Still, this one was hard to shake, particularly when she saw Shaheer cozied up with Baz ‘Brutus’ Césaire.

The other Roman Twin, Antonia Césaire, stood when she saw Fatimah approached. She was Antony today, her vitiligo camouflaged in foundation and dressed to kill. The first time they’d met in person, was it? Fatimah had tracked the Roman Twins’ growth with interest but had never gone to the trouble of a personal visit. It was a recipe for disaster, but Fatimah permitted her eyes to wander for one moment, before returning to Antonia’s dark expression.

“Antony,” Fatimah said with a sunny smile. “I see you’ve rounded up a little group, here.”

Baz’s face was set in a twin expression of grim annoyance to his sister’s, still sitting closer to Shaheer than Fatimah would prefer. Well, Fatimah would have preferred for Shaheer to be halfway across the country, but next to Baz Césaire was certainly not high on her list of alternatives to ‘Morocco with three fake passports.’

Across from the two men was… someone Fatimah hadn’t expected to find there. She supposed with her, and Baz, Antonia, that left someone to cover the espionage specialty, but she was impressed that the Roman Twins had managed to hook her in.

Simone Glass was staring up at Fatimah with an expression approximating gleeful worship.

“No Cracks,” Fatimah said, and leaned over the table to shake her hand. “An unexpected pleasure.”

The short redhead shook her hand enthusiastically. “The pleasure’s all mine, Pinion.”

“Call me Pinny,” Fatimah said, and Simone agreed immediately, eyes shining.

Fatimah had called on Simone Glass before, albeit through channels of communication that didn’t involve coming in-person. While Simone was a near-flawless climber and damn good at slipping by unseen for someone who, by all accounts, didn’t know when to shut her mouth, Fatimah had other reasons to consider her an asset. Namely, Glass’s father, Focu, and Focu’s relation to Fatimah and Shaheer’s own father.

She had the exact opposite reason to  _ dis _ trust the Césaires.

“Scoot over,” she said to Antonia with another disarming smile, then wedged herself into the booth next to them. “What’s going on, here?”

Baz pursed his lips. “We have a problem.”

Antonia, never one to relinquish control, held up her hand for her brother to let her explain it. “We need to take down the Sett.”

Fatimah didn’t react outwardly. Inwardly, she started running the numbers on whether she could bash Baz’s head into the table hard enough to knock him out so she could extract Shaheer and get the hell out of this situation.

“Quite an undertaking,” Fatimah said brightly when she determined that wasn’t going to happen. Next option was sweet-talking and then a rather hasty escape. “Why in the New World do you want to do that?”

Antonia Césaire was an interesting case, in Fatimah’s eyes. Less of a loose cannon than her brother, but evidently no less prone to biting off far more than she could chew. She enjoyed looking like she was in control, and conversely shied away from appearances of weakness. But asking for help necessitated that; Fatimah wasn’t inclined to go into business with anyone who wasn’t ready to humble themselves a little. And she wasn’t inclined to go into business with the Césaires. Finally, she said, “They stole from us.”

“Unless it was that little heirloom you prize, I’m quite confident you should let them exit with their loot and try not to do whatever it was that baited them again,” Fatimah said, not letting her gaze stray to Shaheer even as she itched to drag him out of there and have someone quietly dispose of both of the Roman Twins. She smiled at Antonia.

At Fatimah’s allusion to their father’s map, Antonia and Baz both stared daggers at Shaheer. Fatimah raised her hands for peace.  _ If they didn’t want my brother to tell me about it, they shouldn’t have told him about it. _

“Well, they’re after the map,” Antonia finally ground out. “Coliseum’s accounts are the first of many targets, doubtless.”

“Hm,” Fatimah said, and the smile slipped off her face.

Now  _ there _ was a reason not to incapacitate all of them and put Shaheer on a plane until he learned to behave. Toppling the Sett was Fatimah’s white whale, but Fatimah knew better than to go sea for that. Her own org, the Nest, would be shredded to pieces if she sent them up against the Sett. Not to mention she was certain plenty of her employees were double agents working for them, as were some of the Sett’s for her. Taking them out was more of a personal passion project than a real objective. Five minutes ago, there was no motivator other than for more control, power, and personal fulfillment.

Now there was another motivator; not letting the most powerful territory-prediction software fall into the Sett’s hands, thereby allowing them to sweep the entire New World’s crime underworld and put a monopoly over all activity.

Fatimah weighed the odds, already knowing her answer. She looked at Shaheer and frowned.  _ But I’m not letting him get involved in all this. _ She looked back at Antonia, who was somehow stunning even while scowling.  _ And we’re going to do this my way. _ No better time to establish control than immediately.

“Well, if we’re going to be partners, no secrets,” Fatimah said breezily. Baz scoffed at that, and Fatimah ignored him.  _ Rather, no secrets being kept by them. And they’ll be partners; I’ll be in charge.  _ “No Cracks, this is Sebastian and Antonia Césaire. Twins, this is Simone Glass, daughter of Focu, the Sicilian boss. And you’ve both met my brother.”

Baz and Antonia both hissed as Fatimah offered their real names to Simone, and Simone seemed halfway between anger to have her own identity revealed and delight that she now knew Baz’s. When Fatimah met Baz’s simmering gaze, challenging him to move against her for the power play, Baz looked away and stared at Simone.

“Focu’s daughter,” he echoed.

“Césaire?!” she demanded.

“Mhm,” Fatimah said and Simone’s eyes widened to the point of popping. More than simply proving she would have the upperhand no matter what they tried, there had been another point to Fatimah’s reveal. Not many carried Césaire as a surname, in the New World, and anyone who did now had a very, very good reason to change it. Any team of hers would need to be caught up on  _ exactly _ what was going on if they wanted a popsicle’s chance in Hell of pulling this off.

“Most can’t spot the family resemblance, don’t worry,” Antonia said dryly. Still, the way she was looking at Fatimah made Fatimah smile. Used to being in control, definitely, and not happy to have it torn right out of her hands. Fatimah would need to be watching her back, now. Good thing she was always watching her back.

Troy Césaire had been dead for eighteen years; he’d been one of the most widely reviled men for half of that time, and counting. Lily-white, golden-haired, and just as blue-eyed and muscular as you’d expect from the police-chief-golden-boy of the New World, Troy Césaire’s legacy by all accounts should have been solid platinum after his death. And then nine years later, the truth had come out. Baz had been expelled from the police academy, the family had lost every cent, and the twins had disappeared to build a name for themselves by spitting on everything the world had expected them to be.

The depth of Césaire Sr.’s corruption and depravity was, in fact, not the worst thing about him. That honour fell squarely to ‘the map,’ the innocuous-seeming computer program he’d headed the creation of and left the only surviving copy to his children. Which, again, had the power to destroy the entire underworld and reshape it in favour of whoever both possessed it and the brainpower to know what to do with it. Nothing was more on-brand than nearly destroying the world after his own death for Troy Césaire, though.

When the dust had settled on the identity reveals, Fatimah cleared her throat.

“Right. I’m in, on a few conditions,” she said, and crossed her legs. “First. I’m leading this team.”

“Like hell you are,” Antonia spat immediately. “This is our turf.”

Fatimah touched Antonia’s hand, who snatched it away, and shook her head. “No, it’s not. This is a lovely little club, but we both know the score,” she said as she pulled her phone out beneath the table to send an orange flare to her escort outside. A dozen people, dressed in the same utterly forgettable clothes as Baz, stepped into the club from the front doors and the back. Brawlers. None honed so sharp as Baz, unfortunately, but twelve versus one had a way of tipping the odds in Fatimah’s favour. Simone was impressed. Baz was making an admirable effort to keep his temper under control. Shaheer shrivelled up, embarrassed by Fatimah’s theatrics. And Antonia was livid.

“Oops,” Fatimah said, frowning at her phone. “Damn thing. My bad, folks! You can all go! Sorry!”

They filtered out again to retake their positions, scanning over the faces they’d already scoped out from Fatimah’s bodycam. Fatimah waved her hand and laughed, not entirely feigned, admitting, “I’m absolutely terrible with tech.”

Antonia seethed. “You think you can come into—”

“I can,” Fatimah said. “And I just did. So unless we need to argue this point more, I’d like to move onto condition number two.”

“Please,” Simone chimed in.

Fatimah cut an apologetic look at Baz and said, “Well, as much as it’s not my area, our tech-angle is seeming a little weak. I think it’s best if we find someone with a real specialty for it.” Baz glowered. “I don’t mean to, well,  _ ruffle feathers _ as it were, but the Sett just drained your accounts like you were handing out keys to the safe. I think it’s best that we find someone with a little more experience in the field.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” Simone asked, already craning her head forward to hear Fatimah’s plan. Fatimah was sure Simone didn’t mind that Baz was getting knocked down a peg by Fatimah’s declaration that one of the roles he played would have to be taken over by someone more qualified. It was too bad, really. Fatimah liked to economize, but no expense could be spared for this op, which meant finding someone with an actual specialty for technology, and also someone whose recklessness ran ahead of their common sense.

Fatimah smiled, though it was less of a warm-Fatimah and more of a hunting-Pinion. “We’re going to set a trap.”


	5. Magpie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back on my bullshit <3

_ Suck my dick. Sincerely, Magpie. _

Casper Feltman saved the file, then started the process of breaking into the Alexandrina 2072 E-Sports Mega-Tourney’s opening ceremony. The first stage involved his nutcracker running random passwords through their decentralized command platform, which was probably going to take a few hours.

He swigged an energy drink, then wheeled over to another monitor. His scouts’ reports, refreshed every eight-point-four minutes were rolling in, combing the city for any fish. Virtual probes, Casper had built the scouts himself after his other proclivities got him banned from most of the Sidi Markets and the scouts he’d bought before the banning were rendered obsolete.  _ Fucking stupid to ban someone from a black market for illegal activity, _ he thought, not for the first time.

These scouts were special, tailored for him, by him. Most scouts either combed for longer and then only brought back the biggest catches, for casual cyberscammers. Other, more upscale scouts could refresh in fractions of seconds, casting a finer net to mine through many smaller accounts. That would take a whole team to monitor, though, and Casper was one man. Well, boy. A boy and a woman if you counted his mother.

“Here you are, dear,” his mother said from the entrance of his room.

Casper’s trap music drowned her out.

“ _ Here you are, dear, _ ” she repeated, setting a piece of buttered toast down in front of him.

When he noticed her leaning over him, he made a noise that could have been interpreted many different ways. She sighed and retreated again, leaving him to flip through the scouts’ reports.

_ Nothing, nothing, nothing… What?! _

Casper leaned closer to the screen, blinking furiously to make sure the glaze granted to him by several late nights in a row wasn’t making him see things.

_ Coliseum Club / Gambling Den / High Earn / Est. 12min / Sugg. Auto-Immune _

He was pulling up the scout’s detailed report immediately. Gambling dens weren’t Casper’s hit of choice, but twelve minutes was ridiculous, even if it was suggesting he take the auto-immune approach. That was definitely not Casper’s preferred route into a system, but… twelve minutes. Coliseum was owned by those Greek oddballs, or something, right? That had to be a ripe fruit.

So for the first time in about a week, Casper packed up his case and left his mom’s apartment.

“Where are you going?”

“Meeting some friends,” Casper grunted, already halfway out the door.

“Have fun, honey!”

He killed five minutes waiting at the maglev station on his portable headset—shit audio compared to what he had in his room, but whatever;  _ twelve minutes _ , he’d be back soon enough—chatting in Confab with the foetus Hellraiser team he was smurfing with that week.

Soon enough, the maglev was dropping him right at the edge of the slums. Casper wrinkled his nose, tightened the faded jacket he’d grabbed around his shoulders, and headed toward Coliseum and the fat pockets it had left exposed.

Unluckily for him, there was a backdoor. Not the sort he usually liked where some fucko had gotten hired to do cybersecurity and had forgotten to block the most obvious entrances, but… a literal backdoor where anyone coming out of the club could spot him if he tried to tuck into an alcove and run out the clock.

Casper shielded his eyes and looked up at the roof. With a higher connection to the Web, he might even shave a minute off that unbelievable predicted time. Hoisting his case above his head, Casper took a running start and scaled the side of the building, wedging the toe of his boot into the uneven bricks. Despite the eaves creaking as he used them to haul himself up, they held. He was certainly not an athletic person, but a degree of dexterity was required to man the tech set-up in his room.

A moment later, he was cross-legged on the roof of Coliseum with his keyboard under his fingers. Auto-immunes were, as he had said, not his preferred system for getting into a lockbox. They required  _ moving _ , something Casper did as little as possible of, and occasionally camping out in cramped places for hours at a time.

An auto-immune attack worked by exploiting a common security system; when the system detected an attack, it would send its own counter-attack to wipe out the threat before it could get past the defenses. All that needed to be done to manipulate it was to get yourself onto the same Web access point, mask your IP, and send out a weak attack. The security system would tear itself apart and Casper would be into the club’s accounts in  _ twelve minutes _ . These kinds of attacks took hours for an easy mark, and up to months for big fish. Twelve minutes for a notorious gambling den...

Twelve minutes later, Casper was very confused. How could the Coliseum have  _ no _ money?

Twelve minutes and one second later, Casper was out cold.

After trying to hack into the accounts of a gambling den, being knocked out, and probably landing hard on something based on his throbbing headache, Casper couldn’t say that he was  _ entirely  _ surprised to wake up in a dingy basement surrounded by people examining him.

“This is the guy replacing me? He can’t be more than fifteen.” A low, disbelieving grumble.

“Shut up, he’s waking up.” A higher voice, probably a woman’s. Hint of nasality.

Casper groaned, then his eyes fluttered open. First thing he noticed was that someone had taken his headset off him. And it didn’t feel like his phone was in his pocket either. His hands were tied behind him, zip ties judging by the cutting pressure on his wrist and his presumed captors’ financial situation.

He blinked hard, vision clearing to show him five people all clustered around the room. That was probably the longest he’d consecutively slept in weeks. His insomnia didn’t take well to tourney-season, especially not this year.

“I’m sure Pinny can tell you all about him,” an older woman said from the back of the room where she was leaning against a table, spectacularly bored-looking. She was tall, her skin deep brown and her black dreads woven with hints of silver bands, looking dressed for a night of clubbing. Casper guessed, anyway; he wasn’t especially familiar with how adult women dressed for nights out.

“I sure can,” another woman’s voice piped up, the one nearest to him next to the short red-haired girl who was peering at him like he was a weird insect. “Team, meet Casper Feltman, our new director of cyber.”

“Your… what?” he rasped. “How do you know who I am?”

“You’ve been online since you were four, Casper. Or do you prefer Magpie? You’ve got a biography just lying around on the Web,” the same woman who knew his name said with a warm smile. She was tall, also Black but lighter-skinned, though that was where the similarities ended. Where the bored woman was broad, the smiling woman was thin. The bored woman was beautiful and the smiling woman was… fairly ordinary. Her nose seemed slightly misaligned, like it had been broken a long time ago. Her dark eyes snaked over every inch of Casper like she was some sort of android, scanning him and storing away her finds.

“No, I don’t,” Casper said, scowling at the implications. His room might be a sty, according to his mother, but his digital trail got thoroughly scrubbed every month.

“You do, if you know where to look. And I do.” She shrugged and smiled again. It was an odd sort of smile; Casper would have figured it’d cold and mean given the context, but it seemed quite genuine to him. “Sorry, kid. I won’t spill your secrets. Alright, team, forget what I just told you. This is Magpie, and he’s our new director of cyber.”

“He’s a kid!” the redhead exclaimed, running an unimpressed stare over him.

The woman with the misaligned nose, who Casper began to suspect was in charge, shrugged. “Seventeen.”

“I’ll be eighteen next year,” Casper pointed out. That was likely not the most important thing to clarify during this kidnapping, but nonetheless Casper felt it was worth saying.

“That’s what seventeen means,” the redhead snorted. “Alright. Well, I’m sure he’s more qualified than Baz.”

“Shut up, Glass.” The man in the corner spoke for the first time; Casper thought he and his rather broad frame were probably responsible for his pounding headache.

“Shut up, Césaire,” the girl mimicked.  _ Césaire? _ A familiar surname, but he couldn’t quite place it. Probably also because of the pounding headache.

“Seventeen, and yet not acting the most childishly in this room,” the beautiful woman in the corner remarked as ‘Glass’ and Baz straightened up like birds posturing before a fight, then she walked over to Casper and stared down at him. “You know your way around tech?”

“Yes…?” Casper snorted. “I knew enough to get into your baby’s-first-vault system, anyway.”

Bravado was a poor choice at the time, and the woman seemed to agree, a hand lashing out to plant on Casper’s chest and pin him back to his chair. She could slip it an inch or two up and have it around his throat in an instant. Casper tried not to audibly shriek.

“No one taught you manners?”

The other woman sighed. “We don’t need his help with  _ manners _ . Anywhere, where are mine, right?” She laughed. “Let’s get introductions out of the way. I’m Pinion, but you can call me Pinny. This peach is Antony, and her brother Brutus, and that’s my brother, and she’s No Cracks.”

Casper had hardly noticed the man Pinion named her brother, standing by the door with his arms crossed. He was similarly unremarkable to his sister, but where she radiated intense confidence, he radiated… tepid insecurity.

First, he stared up at Pinion. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or go into catatonia. The latter seemed safest, in the moment.  _ I got kidnapped by Pinion. That’s cool. Very cool. Supreme. _

“What… what do you want?” he finally asked.

“I want to offer you a job!” Pinion said. “Paid, if we pull it off. Super illegal, but I have a feeling that’s not a dealbreaker for you.”

_ Ah! Of course, Pinion wants to give me a job, _ he thought, and blinked. “What the hell do you need my help with?”

“Someone stole from my dear Antony”—Pinion placed her hand on Antony’s shoulder, who slapped it right off—“and I want to set that right. I’m putting together a little team, found a weak link, and thought we could use someone new in the mix.”

Casper surveyed the people in the room, feeling oddly calm despite the hammering of his heart.  _ So Pinion and her deep-crime friends want me to join their team. _

He dared look Pinion in the eye. Her eyes were dark and bright, like a bird’s. “If you know my history, you know I’m not much of a teamplayer.”

Pinion cracked a smile. “Yes. But I also know you’re the best, and I’m only interested in the best. We can work on the other stuff. Team-building, and that sort of thing; my brother’s specialty.”

_ Team-building? _ Casper squinted at her. That wasn’t a normal specialty. As best he could, he gestured to each of them in turn with his chin.

“Leader,” he said to Pinion, then turned to the man she’d called Brutus. “Brawler?” Then to Antony. “Swindler.” He peered at Shaheer and said, somewhat bemused, “Team-builder.” And then ‘No Cracks-slash-Glass,’ the redheaded girl who was now giving him an expectant look. “And… I dunno, court jester?”

“Espionage, fucker,” she snarled.

“That’s quite the portfolio.”

Despite the rather nasty kick that incited toward his shin, it earned an amused look from Pinion, and that was worth it.

So maybe Casper was dumb as a box of rocks, as he had begun to think lately, or maybe it was Pinion’s snort, or maybe it was the fact that the Alexandrina Mega-Tourney was next month and Casper missed being part of a  _ real _ team, not just with and against new players he thrashed for fun, but he drew in a breath and said,

“I’m in.”


	6. The Second First Meeting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hehe angsty TawnyFeather go brr

That night should have been a blur.

Nine years later, Tony desperately wished it  _ had  _ been a blur, but the truth of her memory remained the same. Clearer than most other memories from that long ago, for that matter.

Tony—still Tony, back then—had been on the maglev, on the way home from the restaurant she waitressed. She’d changed out of her uniform for the ride home; creepers on the train were always an irritant. The newsband the scrolled across the train’s interior was part of the background hum. She’d closed her eyes and listened to the heavy-bassed music she preferred at that time.

Maybe if she’d kept them open she would have seen what was on those newsbands. Maybe if she’d had her earbuds out she would have heard the flurry of whispers as the news broke. As it stood, it wasn’t until she got home that she finally pulled out her phone as it synced to the Web of their house.

Paused the music. Hovered her finger over  _ Dismiss all _ to whisk away the array of geo-ads she’d picked up on the train ride home.

Froze when she saw  _ Troy Césaire _ in the headline. Confusion, then more confusion, then a slow, sinking horror.

_ Hero Cop Troy Césaire’s Corruption Revealed! _

__ That was impossible. She tapped. Scrolled down.

_ The New World’s golden-boy of crime-fighting Troy Césaire has been unmasked at last. A stunning exposé from investigative reporter Raafi Johansson delves deep into the late police captain’s entanglements with organized crime, dirty politics, and police corruption. _

__ There was more. The article went on, almost gleeful as it named them—embezzlement, laundering, smuggling,  _ trafficking _ —but Tony’s arm went limp, dropping her phone to her side. There was a faint hum in her ears.

That was impossible.

Troy Césaire, her own father, had been a near-angelic presence in their lives. Dead when she and her twin were only twelve. Spoken of in reverent tones. Remembered only as a faint flash of bright blue eyes that neither she nor Baz shared, golden hair, strong arms lifting her around the waist and swinging her around. He called her Antonia. That was mostly when they were very young. Their mother had suspected he had been cheating on her, later, after his death; Tony remembered that in bright detail, too. Years ago, when she was sixteen, and her mother had been crying at the kitchen counter. Feeling guilty, needing to talk to someone, and Tony had walked in. Came with the turf of being her only daughter, Tony supposed.

Maybe-infidelity seemed laughable now.

Tony blinked at the front door of their house. The same brown wood. The same inset, blurry frosted window. The same scrape on the wood where their wreath had dragged in the wind.

This wasn’t real.

This couldn’t be real.

The door swung open. Baz must have seen her standing through the window. He’d heard the news. She’d heard the news. They looked at each other.

“What are we gonna do, Baz?” she asked. It didn’t really sound like her. More like she was an actor in one of their mom’s soaps, just reading off the script she’d seen minutes earlier. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” Baz said and his eyes were hard. He was going to blow up at something, blow off some steam. Tony wished she could find the valve to open up all the pressure building in her chest, to just ease it off.

That had never been something she could tap into. She remembered bad encounters from kindergarten. This shit was never going to go away, she realized very suddenly, standing on the porch of the house where their embezzling, smuggling,  _ trafficking _ father had lived. This was not one bad day. This was the rest of their lives. There were going to be more headlines as the news spread. Everyone was going to know.

Baz. What the fuck was Baz going to do? Finishing his last year at the police academy. This was going to destroy everything. She could see him wound tight to snapping, but he didn’t blow up yet. Not at her, anyway. He just backed out of the entryway and disappeared deeper into the house.

Their mother wasn’t home. Tony was glad. She wasn’t ready to see anyone. She curled up on her bed and scrolled. More headlines. More details. Names. Faces. Associates. Men he’d jailed, men he’d been heralded as a hero for imprisoning, and now… He was one of them, wasn’t he? He was  _ worse _ .

An hour disappeared. Then another followed. Tony was usually hungry after work. The idea of trying to eat now was unthinkable. Bile rose.

_ Friday, _ she thought. She’d had plans. Every one of her friends was going to know. They would drop her, or they’d pity her, and she couldn’t stand to face either. She finally closed the news stories and decided her friends would take her cancellation as implied.

This was a night for making bad choices. This was a night to be turned into a blur, to get out of her head, black out, and wake up somewhere else.

Surgical in her movements, she moved to the closet. Black, sheath, that would be fine. Silver, heavy chains over her wrist. Neck. Make-up. Dark eyes. Mysterious, stranger, unrecognizable. Their mother’s deep brown Côte d'Ivoire skin would see them through. No one would remember that Troy Césaire’s children weren’t blonde cherubs. The cap on the brown foundation that would cover her unforgettable vitiligo was popped off. She would disappear into a crowd nicely, this way. It would be nice to disappear. One night, a week, the rest of her life. She’d see how long the façade lasted.

The club found her. The music was audible from outside, the flashing strobe visible. She felt it pulse in her ribs. Good.

The woman found her.

Girl? Woman. Somewhere middling between the two.

Tony had installed herself close enough to the bar that her drink wouldn’t empty. She was spending more than she should. She wanted those numbers to blur. The lights were blurring. The music was turning into a background  _ thud-thud-thud  _ of kickdrum. This was better.

She first saw her across the bar, leaving the backroom. Strobe, flash, strobe, three people. Two men, one short, one reedy and tall. A woman, sort of. She carried herself like one, but couldn’t be older than Tony. Certainly didn’t look like she was waitressing to get herself through college for a probably-worthless degree, pissing away her time.

Tall, narrow. She was wearing a suit. Who wore a suit to a club? Lighter brown skin, a thin, aquiline nose, and eyes like brown glass glittering in the lights of the club. Brown glass? Like something that was supposed to be see-through, layered over and over again until it was as deep and impenetrable as stone.

Tony watched her go. She was staring, but that didn’t matter. Getting caught staring would be the least of her problems. Tony knocked back the rest of her drink. There was something very… difficult to exactly label about this woman. The gin wasn’t helping.

It was like she had her own personal command of gravity. Even as she walked past strangers, everyone seemed to turn to her, just a fraction. The suit was clean and sharp, but not remarkable. The woman was interesting to look at, like a good painting, but not model-beautiful. There was just something about her turning heads, and Tony wasn’t immune.

The woman disappeared into the crowd, taking that strange hum with her, and Tony sighed at herself. A distraction, at least, but now she was gone. Time to find something else. Maybe it would be at the bottom of this glass. She’d almost managed to forget the strange woman when she heard a voice, nearly in her ear.

“Gonna stare at me all night or can I buy you a drink?”

Tony turned, and there she was. Even more magnetizing up close. She swallowed, and put down the empty glass on the bar. It was empty. Damn it. The woman smiled. Crooked smile. Distracting smile.

“Please,” Tony said eventually. Her voice was rasping.

The bartender moved faster for her than he did for Tony. She’d come out of one of the backrooms, hadn’t she? What the hell was that about? Things weren’t getting blurry fast enough.

“I’m Sasha,” she said, offering a hand that Tony took. Warm hand, steady grip.

Tony squinted. “How old are you?”   
“No, now you tell me your name.”

Tony kept squinting. She seemed... put-together, but totally out-of-place. With a skin tailor-made, but one she wasn’t used to wearing.

“Nineteen,” Sasha sighed.

Old enough to drink in the New World. Old enough to own the club? No chance. The daughter of the owner, maybe? This wasn’t a particularly law-abiding establishment, from what little Tony knew.

_ Is this the kind of place Dad would’ve gone? _

“I’m twenty-one.” Tony coughed and attempted to soothe it with gin. That went badly. “I mean, I’m…” Antonia Césaire. Césaire, daughter of Troy Césaire, the police chief,  _ that  _ Césaire, the criminal, the evil, evil—“Uh, Nia.”

“Nice to meet you…” Sasha copied her pause. “Uh, Nia.”

Tony snorted. “Thanks for the drink, Sasha. Got a last name?”   
“You trying to open a credit card under my name, or what?” Too-precise joke. Charming, but sheltered? Tony laughed anyway. “Sasha Blanc.”

_ Yeah, right. _

__ “So.” The way Sasha Blanc’s eyes travelled down the curve of Tony’s silhouette made her pretty confident there weren’t going to be any misunderstandings, even in Tony’s semi-buzz. “Drinking to forget, or what?”

She reminded Tony of a hawk. That’s what it was. Sharp, bright eyes that probed for weaknesses. Casual questions looking for answers.

Tony grunted. “Something like that.”

“Looking for company?”

“Why not.”

_ Why not, _ echoed, nine years after the day the news broke. Nine years after ‘Sasha Blanc’ and the nameless club. Nine years after the night that refused to blur.

_ Why not, you dumb motherfucker? _ was all Tony could think as Shaheer put down his phone and the doors whirred open. Pinion’s shadow; tall, narrow.  _ Because that wasn’t just some random, stubbornly memorable one-night. That was Pinion. _

Which was the sort of revelation that might make a person less cynical than Tony think,  _ This can’t get any worse. _

And then Pinion walked over to their table, the raw charisma of nine years ago honed to a fine weapon, and called her ‘Antony.’

_ She doesn’t remember,  _ Tony realized, looking up into those deep brown-glass eyes, and couldn’t say for sure why that sunk so deeply into her gut.  _ She doesn’t remember me. _

**Author's Note:**

> will this update? yes probably I have seven other chapters written. Will it be completed? probably not. but get on the bus.


End file.
